communicating climate7
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The Right Tools to Talk Climate
At AGU, you need the right tools to understand what’s going on, and to get where you need to go. Columbia researchers have been looking for the right tools to navigate another complicated place: The gap between what climate science tells us, and how a lot of the public hears that information.
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Geography Awareness Week: Freshwater is Serious Fun
For adults concerned about environmental issues, particularly the growing water crisis, it can be hard to know where to start to educate and involve the children in their lives, those who will ultimately be facing the consequences of what we do or don’t do now. How do you frame serious, complicated issues in a way…
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Climate Change and the PR Problem
On Friday, July 9, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sent a letter to the individuals who will contribute to the group’s Fifth Assessment Report. Part of the memo instructed researchers how to interact with the media, largely in response to growing criticism of the IPCC’s process and reporting.…
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Dazed but Mostly Confused: Why Americans don’t know what to think about climate change
A string of recent polls have heralded the decline of American interest in climate change: fewer people believe in it, fewer people see it as a serious problem, and more people think scientists don’t agree about it. Coupled with recent scandals over hacked emails and allegations of inaccuracy in the IPCC, these polls seem to…
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Climate and Public-Health Communities Train Together
For the third year in a row, public-health professionals and climate scientists from around the world are visiting Columbia University’s Lamont campus, where the International Research Institute for Climate and Society is based, to learn how to use climate information to make better decisions for health-care planning and disease prevention. They’re taking part in the…
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Illuminating the Science: Art and Climate Change Part II
Last week I expressed some skepticism that art and climate science were complementary languages. I also expressed some hope that the nature of these two fields – that is, that they both are ways of better knowing the world – really were reconcilable, and could create a better robustness of understanding the natural world. I’m glad…
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Creating More Useful Forecasts
Seasonal forecasts can be effective tools for agricultural planners, water resources managers and other decision makers. For example, after torrential rains and floods wreaked havoc in the West African nation of Ghana in 2007, displacing some 400,000 people there, the regional office of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies started using…
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Illuminating the Science: Art and Climate Change
On Thursday I’ll be attending Illuminating the Science: Art and Climate Change. The event’s project is surely ambitious.  It claims not only that climate data might be better communicated, or made more robust, through the arts, but that indeed “the landscape of numbers can be populated by dreams in the form of images, dance or music,…
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Looking Back on Winter: Part I
The arrival of spring in temperate climates means more hours of daylight, showers and flowers. Despite the general mood improvement from the dark days of winter, we should not be quick to forget the controversies surrounding this past season. Winter 2010, deemed by media outlets as Snowmaggedon and Snowpocalypse, was the snowiest season on record…
Congratulations to our Columbia Climate School MA in Climate & Society Class of 2024! Learn about our May 10 Class Day celebration. #ColumbiaClimate2024